More Information

Tara G. Shears, Ph.D.

Nobel Conference 49 Oct. 1 & 2, 2013

Tara G. Shears, Ph.D., professor of physics and Royal Society University Research Fellow at CERN, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Particle physicist Tara Shears started her career investigating the behavior of fundamental particles and forces for the OPAL experiment at CERN (the European organization for nuclear research), in Geneva, Switzerland. Her experiments now center on researching the properties of bottom quarks using hadron colliders, testing the Standard Model theory in the electroweak sector, and seeking answers for why there’s so little antimatter in the universe.

After earning a first class honours degree in physics at Imperial College London in 1991, Shears pursued a Ph.D. in particle physics at Cambridge University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Manchester and a CERN fellowship to conduct research using the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider (CERN’s flagship accelerator from 1989 to 2000), she was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship with the University of Liverpool in 2000 to continue her work in the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experimental collaboration at the Fermilab facility near Chicago. In 2004 Shears joined the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, for which she initiated and developed the electroweak and exotica physics working group. The data collected by the LHCb experiment allows her to probe predictions of electroweak boson production to high precision. Shears has been highly involved in program outreach to explain the Standard Model to the public and raise the awareness of the existence and aims of the LHCb detector on the LHC.